


Cousin

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1920s, Multi, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 02:29:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5357603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aunt Lucy keeps insisting they'll grow into it, but Steve still isn't sure you can grow into someone's cousin.  He thinks maybe you have to be <em>born</em> cousins.</p><p>"Oh, child," Aunt Lucy says, laughing.  "You <em>were</em>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cousin

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr, [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/134440094423/bucky-or-steve-stumbling-upon-a-pair-of-lesbians), and now on AO3 by popular demand. For the prompt, "Bucky and Steve stumble upon a pair of lesbians," which of course I immediately turned on its head.

Steve spent a whole month with Lucille and Cora once, when he was five and his Ma was sick with pneumonia in their rooms. She’d carted him off, down the stairs and across the hall to the fourth-floor apartment that faced the clotheslines in the alley, only a few feet away from the tenement next door. Cora worked with Sarah Rogers in the ward, and knew how to deal with Steve’s asthma and his brittle bones, his sudden fevers and equally startling chills.

Lucille may not have known anything about the common cold or the uncommonly sick child, but she had sure studied up on how to spoil rotten one tiny, American boy. She insisted that Steve call her Aunt Lucy, and took off work at the library to bring him to the fair, held a finger to her crimson lips and smiled wide when Steve asked what Cora had said about taking the train all the way into Manhattan to see the new lion at the zoo.

Aunt Lucy always had something baking, once she learned that even sickly little boys loved chocolate cookies and apple pie, and even after Sarah Rogers recovered (though she never quite kicked the cough) and Steven Grant started school, he would scramble up the stairs to the fourth floor after classes for Lucille’s cookies and the thick lipstick of her smile.

“They’re cousins,” he explained to Bucky through a mouth full of chocolate bar and a glass of Ovaltine, shrugging when Bucky frowned. Aunt Lucy was round as a sticky bun and colored, and Cora looked like a sour string bean with lank blond hair paler than even Steve’s. But Bucky’s family lived with his cousins, and Beatrice Barnes was uglier than a dump truck and cross-eyed to boot. Steve figured there was no telling, with cousins.

(He’d only brought Bucky around because Aunt Lucy had insisted, lifting him onto her wide lap and asking him all about his day while Sarah Rogers worked the late shift at the ward. So he’d told her, about how he’d met Bucky defending Becky Barnes from mean Gertie Thomas, and how Bucky had taken a slingshot to the O’Boyle cousins when they’d threatened to break Steve’s knees.

“I’d like to meet your young man,” Aunt Lucy had decided, and Steve had flushed to the roots of his hair.)

“But they’re old,” Bucky replied, kicking Steve’s shins under the table, fidgeting in the too-large chairs.

They _were_ old—older than Steve’s Ma, and maybe older than stern Sister Joan, who Becky swore was past thirty. Steve thought about this, chewing on a withered apple slice. “Maybe they’re poor,” he decided, because his Ma said the O’Brien family downstairs had gone to stay with relatives when they couldn’t pay the bills. “I guess you’d live with Beatrice –” Both boys grimaced, wrinkling their noses and pinching them shut. “- if you were old and poor.”

“Pffft,” Bucky spat, pretending to be sick. “Not a chance. I’d just live with you.”

“Of course you would,” Aunt Lucy declared, swooping in with a fresh plate of oatmeal cookies and ruffling Steve’s hair, her smile wide and red lipstick smeared across one tooth. “That’s what cousins do.”

“ _We’re_ not cousins,” Steve told her, swiveling in the chair to stare up at her cheerful face.

Aunt Lucy’s whole body shook when she laughed. “Oh, child, I’ve been Cora’s cousin since I saw her in knee-high stockings and flapper curls these ten years past.” She pinched Steve’s cheek, and chuckled when he rubbed at it and scowled. “You just wait long enough, and being cousins will come in its own time.”

Steve looked at Bucky, who shrugged, just as confused by Lucy’s proclamation as Steve had been. Who wanted to be Cora’s cousin anyway? She didn’t paint her face, like Aunt Lucy, and she only ever smiled when Lucy turned on the phonograph and started to dance.

“Guess you’d be a better cousin than Beatrice,” Bucky announced, and that was the end of that.

* * *

“Why, you’re Steven Grant Rogers!” Dum Dum said, reaching out and shaking Steve’s hand as though they weren’t in the middle of a thirty-mile march back to safety, and Steve hadn’t just saved them all from a slow death without time to introduce himself.

“Uh,” Steve managed, trying to extract his hand from Dugan’s. “Yes?”

“You’re with Sarge!” Dugan added, winking like he still had factory ash in one eye. “He’s been talking about his cousin since he joined up.”

“Beatrice?” Steve asked, even more confused than he had been five seconds before. Beatrice had grown up as mean as ever, had married a lawyer, moved to Manhattan, and refused to come to Brooklyn ever again. Why would Bucky talk about Beatrice to _anyone_? 

“Don’t worry about it,” Bucky interrupted, slinging one arm over Steve’s shoulders and then pulling it away when it didn’t sit right, Steve taller now and four times as broad. “We call him Dum Dum for a reason, you know.”

 

But that night, camping in enemy territory, everyone seemed to sleep on the other side of the trees, leaving Steve and Bucky on their own just over the next small hill.

Steve stared at Bucky in the last of the Italian light, tracing the fresh hollows of his cheeks, the streak of ash down his temple that mirrored the shadows under his pale eyes. His confusion must have shown in his face, along with the fear he couldn’t kick, that he would blink and Bucky would be gone, that if Steve slept he’d wake up to ash and factory bone and have lost the only person who—because Bucky smiled, tired and small, and said, “You still haven’t figured it out, huh?”

“Figured what out?” Steve wondered, forcing himself to look away from Bucky and at the suspiciously empty space around them. “Why no one wants to sleep near me?”

Bucky snorted, and ducked his head the way he always had when he was lying to the Sisters at their school. “Not no one,” he told his boots, but Steve’s new ears meant that he heard every word, even if they didn’t make any sense.

It took Steve till England, a whole week after they made it back to camp and back over the ocean and into training with a handpicked band of idiots. It took a week of Dugan’s winking and the men’s insistence on changing bunks until Steve and Bucky were left alone in a room meant for six, a week of Bucky ducking his head without telling a single lie, and a letter from Aunt Lucy that had been sent to four different USO sites before making it to Steve.

“ _I hope you find your young man, Stevie, since you’re headed out to the war. Dear Cora –_ ” Who was as dear as a grizzly bear, and watched Steve like he might keel over dead even after he weighed two hundred pounds. “- _says to tell your cousin hello, and that she’s terribly sorry he had the misfortune to choose you. She’s kidding of course, dear boy, and Mr. Smith down the block is . . .”_

Steve sat up so fast he hit his head on the bunk above him, and Bucky leaned over and peered at him, upside down. “Whatsa matter?” he grumbled, face puffy with sleep, the shadows in his eyes instead of underneath.

“I’m your cousin,” Steve said, fumbling with the letter and the words and the ache in his head from hitting the bunk slat. “I’m your _cousin_.”

Bucky snorted and shook his head, exasperated and grumpy and smiling just a little despite that, the way Cora always had when Lucy dragged her into a dance. “Figured it out, then?” he asked, head still hanging upside down and yawning at Steve’s shocked face.

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve remonstrated, because they were cousins and Bucky didn’t seem to think this was an important enough conversation to have right side up or out of bed. “You—you told the men. You chose me.”

Grumbling under his breath, Bucky hooked his fingers under his mattress, rolling out of his bunk into a neat, cross-legged position sitting next to Steve’s shins. “I chose you back in 1933, you punk. Three years _after_ I figured out what Aunt Lucy meant.”

Steve’s eyes went wider. “Lucy and Cora—oh. Oh. Bucky, they’re not really—Bucky, stop laughing. Bucky! Bucky, damnit, this isn’t _that_ funny. Bucky, if you piss yourself on my mattress –”

“We could always use mine,” Bucky interrupted, huffing with laughter, a different spark entirely in his blue eyes.

“Guess we could,” Steve allowed, breathless with something that wasn’t the echoes of Bucky’s laughter, or the asthma that had rattled his lungs. “ _Cousin_.” There were six mattresses, after all, and plenty of time.


End file.
